


"I Know Him"

by FloatingWorldPictures



Category: Bucky Barnes - Fandom, Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), the winter soldier - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-08
Updated: 2014-04-08
Packaged: 2018-01-18 16:15:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1434739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FloatingWorldPictures/pseuds/FloatingWorldPictures
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Searching for his former identity as Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier meets a historian who has spent her life researching the Howling Commandos.  She once believed she'd discovered the identity of the Winter Soldier, but everyone told her she was wrong, that he was just a ghost story.  Now, he's asking for her help.  Will helping him learn the truth about his past get her killed?  Or, can she help him reconnect his old friends?</p>
            </blockquote>





	"I Know Him"

**Author's Note:**

> This one-shot story is an extension of the second credits scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. As such, it contains spoilers for that film!
> 
> I just saw the movie again and realized that I misremembered what Bucky is wearing in this scene - he has on a baseball cap and a jacket rather than a hoodie. I don't know why I remembered it as a hoodie the first time. But I'm leaving it as a hoodie in the story, and hopefully it doesn't ruin it for you.

    “I Know Him”

 

_Ourself behind ourself, concealed --_

_Should startle most --_

_Assassin hid in our Apartment_

_Be Horror's least._

-Emily Dickinson

  
    I have to work late tonight.  Our emergency-commissioned replica of the missing Captain America suit is ready to be installed in the exhibit.  As the assistant curator, I’m the one who has to stay late after the museum closes to oversee the installation.  I can’t freaking believe someone stole Captain America’s suit.  Like, who _does_ that?  Plus, I had to cancel drinks with my friends to take care of this tonight.  Ugh, Stan really is _so_ fired.  
    I head to the exhibit a few minutes before closing.  The place is usually pretty empty by now, but I notice a lone figure standing in front of the film screen, watching the old reels of the Howling Commandos.  His hands are shoved deep into the pockets of his hoodie, and his shoulders look tense.  He must be a vet.  They flock to this exhibit in droves, but sometimes it can be a little tough for them to watch the film reels, even if their war looked entirely different.  War is war, I guess.  
    There are benches where patrons can sit to watch the clips, since the entire loop takes about 25 minutes to run, but this guy is just standing there, so he’s probably on his way out.  Vets tend to follow instructions without much dawdling, I’ve noticed, so when the announcement plays over the PA that the exhibits are closing they’re always the first ones to clear out.  I wonder what compelled this guy to stick around.  He must really want to see the whole loop.    
    Well, I can’t blame him.  It _is_ interesting stuff.    
    Of course _I_ think that.  The Howling Commandos have been my life’s work.  It started when I was a kid, and my next door neighbor, Mr. Morita, would tell me his war stories while I sat with him on his porch eating these colorful little Japanese sugar candies he always kept -- my mom hated that.  I would come home all hyper from the _konpeito_ candy and manic with excitement after hearing tales of what seemed to me like real-life knights in shining armor.    
    I think my mom also didn’t like that Mr. Morita didn’t exactly edit his stories for the ears of little girls.  He kept in all the violence and left the sugar-coating for the candy.  He never downplayed the fear.  But I wasn’t scared.  I was fascinated.  I’m a historian now because of those sugar-fueled afternoons with Mr. Morita.     
    When he died, I almost failed my twentieth century American history final in college because I blew it off to attend his funeral.  Ironic, isn’t it?  I bring a box of that sugar candy to leave at his gravesite every time I’m back home in Fresno for a visit.  I dedicated my dissertation -- on the Howling Commandos, of course -- to Mr. Morita.  I miss that guy.  
    I kind of hate rushing vets out of the exhibit because I feel like this is somehow their space more than anyone’s, and this particular guy seems really interested in something, but I do have to get this fake Cap suit installed ASAP so the preps can go home.  And so maybe I can catch the last call at happy hour.  It’s been that kind of day.  
    “I’m sorry, sir,” I say as I walk past the man’s back, “the exhibit is closing now.  We open again tomorrow morning at ten.”  I head over to find out from Stan the guard, now switched to day shifts, how many visitors we had come through today.    
    Stan greets me with a worried expression.  “That guy hasn’t budged.  Want me to escort him out?”  
    I glance over my shoulder.  Sure enough, hoodie-guy is still here.  And sure enough, he doesn’t move a muscle for several moments, until the film reel loops back to the beginning.  Then, he slowly makes his way over to my favorite part of the exhibit, the wall dedicated to Sgt. James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes.    
    “He’s definitely a vet,” I say to Stan with a sigh.  Vets always seem to be more interested in Bucky than they are in Captain America.  I think they aren’t entirely comfortable identifying with Cap.  It reminds them of how out of place they feel when they can’t acclimate to being back home, which is hard and I’m sure very lonely.  And, I think Cap brings up some survivor’s guilt in some of them.  “Heroes don’t come home, ma’am,” one Marine said to me once, when I asked what drew him to Bucky.  I think that visiting Bucky’s wall is like making a pilgrimage for their own best friends who didn’t come home.  They feel like it’s important to pay their respects.  
    Ugh.  I cannot ask a guy to leave Bucky’s wall.  But the preps are here and we need to get on with the installation.  
    “Just give me a minute, I’ll walk this gentleman out,” I say to Stan, going over to the man in the hoodie.    
    He doesn’t seem to notice me, which strikes me as odd.  I’ve never met a vet who isn’t hyper-aware of his six.  
    “So.  Bucky Barnes,” I say, both to announce my presence so hoodie-guy doesn’t spook and punch me in the face or something, and by way of a greeting to the big picture of Bucky that’s on the wall.  I like to pay my respects, too.  
    Hoodie-guy nearly jumps out of his skin, but he doesn’t punch me, thank goodness.  He just snaps his head down and shrinks into his sweater, hiding his face.  
    “I’m sorry,” I tell him.  “I didn’t mean to startle you.”  
    He doesn’t say anything, just looks up at the Bucky wall.  
    “Pretty amazing guy, huh?” I say, trying to turn the conversation to something I hope will calm this dude down a little.  
    “You know him?” the man asks in a small voice.  But his question seems, I don’t know, really _urgent_.  Like, this really, really important to him.  And it’s a very strange question to ask _me_ , because obviously I am not 90 years old.    
    “Well, of course, not personally or anything.  I mean, I’ve done so much research on Bucky Barnes over the years that I feel like I know him.  I wish that I had.  Sometimes I feel like we’re old friends.”  
    The man looks at me now.  It scares me.  His eyes are blazing from behind a tangle of dark hair.  I can’t tell if he’s about to murder me or just burst into tears.    
    “You know him?” he says again.  “Tell me.  Please.”    
    I can’t look away from his face.  I know that face.  I know those eyes.    
    But, no.  That’s impossible.  
    I glance around for Stan and the preps, but they’ve left the cart and the tool box and have wandered off somewhere.  Maybe they forgot something back at the shop.  Fantastic.  I am alone with this scary hooded dude who is the splitting image of Bucky Barnes.  I know at least that he probably isn’t a figment of my imagination, though, because Stan saw him, too.  Unless we both see ghosts, or something.  Great...  
    I look at the picture of Bucky on the wall, and then back at the man.  This can’t be.  
    “Please tell me,” he pleads again.    
    My mind is grasping for some logical explanation, but logic has become quicksand and the more I struggle for something, the deeper I sink into crazy.  
    “You must be a relation, are you his...grandson?  Grand-nephew?” I guess.  It would explain why the guy is so desperate to know about Bucky, right?  That seems like a solid explanation.  Or at least, a plausible one.  
      The explanation washes away as all of the research I’ve ever done on Bucky Barnes floods my mind.  
    “But no,” I am talking to myself now, “Bucky did not have any children...”  I trail off as something impossible occurs to me.  
    The man nods hungrily, as if this is exactly what he is looking for and wants me to continue.  He leans into me and clenches my arm in his right hand.  
    “Ow, you’re hurting me,” I say.  I am frightened now.  Not so much frightened of the strength in this man’s grasp, although that is kind of terrifying.  But I don’t think he has any intention of harming me.  No, I’m frightened because his seemingly super-human strength and his uncanny resemblance to Bucky Barnes, I think it means I was right.  
    My crazy theory really started while I was doing research for my dissertation.  My diss was on the members of the Howling Commandos during their stint as POWs and its implication for society’s relationship to the of notion of heroes in the post-war era.  You know, before we had Iron Man and Avengers and, like, real-life superheroes running around on the evening news.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  It’s all very riveting...  
    Of course, everyone knew about the super-soldier serum they dosed Steve Rogers with, but there were so many attempts to recreate that stuff, I knew there must be more to it all.  It was the one thing Mr. Morita never talked much about directly, but he dropped a lot of hints.  Steve Rogers couldn’t have been the only one.  I mean, the HYDRA scientists had to be working day and night on making their own super-soldiers, right?  But every time I found some declassified document that might suggest I was on to something, my research would get shut down.  I would suddenly be denied access to archives, or my visas to travel abroad would be declined, or records would mysteriously disappear, stuff like that.    
    Then this one time, I was in Austria for a conference, and I was in a bar talking to this old dude who claimed he had been kind of like a liaison for HYDRA and the KGB back in the day.  I can’t believe they let that guy live, much less talk to nosy grad students like me.  They probably figured everyone would think he was crazy, because his stories certainly were nuts.  Or he was just making it all up, which I’ve often thought was the most likely scenario.  Anyway, he was an interesting old guy, and sitting there doing vodka shots together while he told me stories about the Winter Soldier -- a soviet era super-soldier with some kind of bionic arm, whom a HYDRA sleeper-cell to this day keeps cryogenically frozen until they need to thaw him out to assassinate someone -- kind of made me nostalgic for Mr. Morita and the _konpeito_.    
    I remember, the part of the drunk Austrian old guy’s story that stuck out in my mind most was that HYDRA had orchestrated it all as a huge eff-you to the Allies because they’d experimented on POWs in forced labor facilities to develop the Winter Soldier.  That seemed important for my dissertation.  I spent a huge chunk of my travel grant money picking up the tab that night.  And that old Austrian guy could hold his liquor, let me tell you.  Better than I could, that’s for sure.  I was so hungover the next day, I couldn’t be sure any of what I remembered of his Winter Soldier stories had been true or if I’d dreamed them up in some vodka-induced haze, so in the end I didn’t really pursue any of his stories for my dissertation.  So many doors were being slammed in my face as it was, and I didn’t want to make it any harder by having to teach myself to read Russian and start chasing down some link between HYDRA and the KGB.  Being a grad student was hard enough.  
    I didn’t really think about the Winter Soldier again until everything went public with Iron Man’s identity as Tony Stark and Steve Rogers being recovered and Dr. Banner surviving that unfortunate gamma radiation accident.  Also, like, an alien invasion of New York City really forces you to rethink what could be true about the world.  I mean, you gotta love a good government conspiracy theory with superheroes and supervillains, but aliens really make you stop and think that, you know, nothing is too crazy to be true.  And who knew aliens could be so hot?  Have you _seen_ Thor?    
    Well, it all made me rethink the likelihood of those Winter Soldier stories.  So they were kind of in the back of my mind when I started work as a post-doc on the Howling Commandos exhibit at the Smithsonian.  
    Anyway, I’m working on Bucky stuff, and I’m thinking about how he had been isolated at the HYDRA facility for supposed medical treatment of injuries sustained when he got the stuffing beat out of him by some guards.  And it just hits me -- wouldn’t it be crazy if _Bucky_ was the Winter Soldier from that Austrian old guy’s stories?  I mean, if Steve Rogers could survive his plane crashing into the ocean and being a Capsicle for all these years, couldn’t Bucky Barnes have survived falling from that train, if they’d been juicing him with the serum at the facility the whole time?  Maybe?  And how poetically tragic would that parallel be?  I couldn’t really think of a bigger eff-you to the Allies than to turn Captain America’s best friend into the Winter Soldier.  I’m pretty sure there are Greek tragedies more cheerful than all that.  
    So I collected a folder of evidence as I worked on research for the exhibit, and when I felt like I had a critical mass, I went to my boss.  My boss is every inch the stereotype of a historian.  He even wears blazers with elbow patches and everything.  He is the most mild-mannered, well-read man I have ever met, and his dedication to the discipline of history is single-minded.  I thought he would be thrilled with my little side project.  
    But when I brought the folder into his office and excitedly explained the discovery I believed I had made, he went white as a sheet.  “Just, stop right there,” he said, getting up from his desk and firmly closing his office door.  His hands were shaking.  
    He went to the window and closed the blinds.  He switched off his computer and unplugged his telephone.  _Christ on a cracker_ , I remember thinking, _is he about to strangle me and steal my research or something?_  
    He took my folder and jammed it into the shredder.  I watched in horror as all my work became confetti.  
    “Listen to me, carefully,” he said, fidgeting with this little octopus-looking pin he always wore on his lapel.  “You are wrong.  This is all just a series of loose coincidences you have strung together with a ghost story.  There is no such thing as the Winter Soldier.  James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ Barnes died in 1945.  Steve Rogers is the only super-soldier.  HYDRA no longer exists.  Do you understand?”  
    “But, just...what if,” I stammered.  
    “ _NO!_ ” my boss shouted, slamming his hands onto his desk.  I jumped, really scared then.  I had never even heard this man raise his voice.  I had never heard him discourage a line of research, disparage pursuing a theory with some evidence behind it, however thin.    
    “Do you understand?” he repeated.  He looked at me as if he needed me to understand more than just what he was telling me now.  
    “Yes,” I said, finally.  “Yes, I understand.  Of course, you’re right.  These are just silly ghost stories.”  
    “Good,” he said.  
    I never brought it up again.  To anyone.    
    But now, I am staring into a face that is the splitting image of Bucky Barnes.  This man is gripping my arm so hard that I’m pretty sure he’s about to snap it in half.  I barely feel anything, though, because adrenaline has shot through my entire body.  Nevertheless, I say, “Ow, you’re hurting me.”  
    He loosens his grasp.  “I’m not here to hurt you,” he says.    
    Well, that’s good news.  
    “I know,” I tell him.  He really does look like he’s going to cry.  
    “You know _him_ ,” he insists, looking back at Bucky’s picture.  
    “Bucky?” I clarify.  
    He nods.  I suddenly realize now that his left hand is still buried deep in the pocket of his hoodie.  His entire left arm -- the one that, according to the drunk Austrian old guy, would have been replaced by HYDRA with a cybernetic one -- is completely hidden by the sweater.  Well, that should be pretty definitive proof, then.  
    He doesn’t object as I reach out and squeeze his left bicep.  This guy clearly works out, so it’s not like I was expecting Pillsbury doughboy arms or anything, but whatever is under the thin cotton of his hoodie, it isn’t flesh.    
    At my sharp intake of breath, he lets my arm go entirely.  “I’m not here to hurt you,” he repeats.  
    “I know,” I tell him again, trying to keep it together.  And then, I don’t know what it is about him but I kind of just give in to the crazy.  I just know that it’s him.  “I know you.  We’re like old friends, remember?”  
    This seems to please him.  He starts to smile, but then looks up over my head, suddenly tense again.  I hear Stan and the preps on their way back.  It sounds like they went to get sodas.  Stan is telling the preps that he promised the doctor he wouldn’t drink it any more.  That guy is a piece of work.  
    I say quietly, “You probably shouldn’t be here.”  
    “I have nowhere else to go,” he whispers.    
    “Yes, you do,” I blurt out.  “You’re coming home with me.”  
    What the frickity-frack am I doing?  I’m just a post-doc, this is, like, light years above my pay grade.  I must be insane.  This is Bucky freaking Barnes.  And I’m pretty sure he actually is the Winter freaking Soldier.  He’s a ruthless and top secret HYDRA assassin!  Only Bucky is really dead and all of this is just a ghost story and I am clearly insane and I can’t just bring this guy home like some little lost puppy.  
    But right now, he is looking at me just like a little lost puppy, and I know that’s exactly what I am going to do.  I know it’s him.  “Meet me outside by the Joseph Henry statue in ten minutes.  Go back through the exhibit and leave through the entrance.  I’ll be right there.”  
    I turn to see if Stan and the preps have noticed that he’s still here, when suddenly he’s just gone.  Huh.  Those are some sweet assassin skills, I guess.  
    The room spins like I’m on some carnival ride and I sit down hard on the floor.  What actually just happened?  This is what it must feel like to for-real lose your mind.  The preps rush over to me and Stan asks if he should call someone.  
    “Oh, wow, that’s weird.  Low blood sugar or something,” I say, waving away their assistance as I get to my feet.  Obviously I’m not going to tell them what really happened.  I couldn’t if I wanted to because I don’t even know.  But I seize this opportunity to duck out early, playing up my swoon like I really need to go home.  
    Stan makes me take his soda and agrees that I should go home immediately.  The preps insist that they can handle the install without me.  The new night guard is due to be there in a few minutes.  Everything will be fine.  I don’t argue, except to try and persuade Stan not to walk me out.  He carries my purse and holds my elbow, and it is agony to force myself to make small talk and walk like a normal human out of the museum.  Once I’m around the corner I practically run to the statue.    
    I am pretty certain this has all been a figment of my imagination and that I’m being patently ridiculous.  There is no way Bucky Barnes actually came to see me today.  The Winter Soldier isn’t real.  I think this must be a clear sign that I am super overworked.  
    But there he is, sitting on the steps next to the statue, waiting for me.    
    “Hi,” I say as I approach.  He stands but doesn’t reply.  
    I decide to spring for a cab rather than take him on the subway back home.  He doesn’t strike me as a guy you want confined in a metal tube under the ground.  He is silent the entire way home in the cab.  He never takes his left hand out of the hoodie pocket, and he is restless and vigilant, constantly looking back out of the rear window or sinking low in the seat so the hood covers his face.  
    It suddenly occurs to me that, if he is the Winter Soldier, then HYDRA probably still exists in some iteration or another.  Which is bad enough in and of itself, but also and perhaps of more immediate concern, that they may not have exactly given Bucky permission to just take off for a little visit to the Smithsonian exhibit on his former identity.  That what I am doing is, in fact, stupid and dangerous and possibly going to get me killed.  I mean, this guy I’m taking home is either a mythic rogue assassin or a complete nutter who is going to wear my skin as a suit or something.  So either way, I am definitely done for.  
    When we get to my apartment, he pushes past me and into the front door as soon as I unlock it.  “Wait,” he says, finally taking his left hand out of his pocket and holding it out to prevent me from going inside.  Oh yeah, that’s a metal arm all right.     
    He disappears for a few minutes.  I figure he’s checking to make sure my apartment is safe, and then I hear some banging noises, which worries me a lot, but he seems un-rumpled when he reappears in the doorway.  “Okay,” he says, moving aside for me to go in.  
    I rush inside and notice that he has closed all the blinds, and also smashed my laptop into tiny bits.  
    “ _Seriously_ , bro?” I cry, running over to it.  
    He holds out his metal arm.  “Your phone.”  
    “Are you going to call someone or break it?”  
    He neither answers nor moves.  I hesitate.  This is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.  And I got a PhD in the humanities, so that’s saying something.  Well, I’ve already gone this far.  Plus, I’m kind of curious to see the metal arm in action.  
    Sighing, I snap my iPhone out of my super-cool custom decoden case with the giant, limited edition Hello Kitty-wearing-a-donut charm, which -- _shut up it totally is super-cool_ \-- would be harder to replace than the phone itself.  I’m pretty sure my phone is still under warranty so I slap it down on his open metal palm.  He simply closes his fingers around it, and my phone splinters into a dozen pieces.    
    I think of my boss’s reaction when I brought him the Winter Soldier research I had compiled.  These precautions -- the blinds, the computer, the phone -- remind me of that day in my boss’s office, and I wonder just how mild-mannered my boss really is.  He must know something about the Winter Soldier, if he was that concerned about anyone finding out I was digging around.  Oh, so very many light years beyond my pay grade right now.  
    I have no idea what to do next, so I figure it’s as good a time as any to have that drink.  Lord knows I could use one and from the look of him, I’m thinking maybe Bucky -- it is so weird to even call him that -- could, too.  He kind of looks like hell.  
    “Sit down, make yourself at home,” I tell him.  “Do you want something to drink?”  
    He doesn’t answer but sits on the couch, shaking back his hood.  I go into the kitchen and open a few bottles of beer, and I think about how the Bucky I know would probably be horrified by the state of this Bucky’s hair.  And it’s such a dumb thing, really, in the scheme of things to be horrified by but it makes me consider that I don’t actually know Bucky at all, do I?  I mean, I don’t know the old Bucky, really, as much as I know _about_ him, and this man sitting in my living room is probably not so much Bucky as he is the Winter Soldier.  As in, he is dangerous in ways I can’t even imagine and I am really, _really_ stupid.  
    I sit down in a chair across from him and hold out a beer.  He stares at it like he’s not entirely sure what he’s supposed to do with it.  Oh, wow, Bucky, what have they done to you that you don’t remember beer?  Finally, I put his on the table between us and drink down my own beer in about two gulps.  It isn’t pretty but if anyone is about to murder me, I’d prefer to be drunk first.  
    “You know... _me_ ,” he says now.    
    “Um...yeah, I know you,” I confirm, not entirely believing it as I say it this time but feeling like it’s what he wants me to say.    
    “Tell me who I am.  Tell me about Bucky.”  
    I take a deep breath.  Where do I even start?  I wish Mr. Morita were still alive.  I wish there was a way to call Steve Rogers.  Is there like a Cap-signal, or something?  I wonder if they ever showed that guy how to work a cell phone...  “Yes, hello, Information?  Can you give me the number for Captain America?”  They must get that all the time.  
    I am taking forever deciding what to say first and I must not be looking so hot because Bucky says to me again, “I’m not here to hurt you.  I just need your help.  I can’t...I don’t know what I remember, what they made me think, what’s real.  I think I know that I’m Bucky.  But...I’m not sure what that means.”  
    I take his untouched beer from the table and drink a few long sips.  Do I even know what it means?  I’m not sure that I do, but I do know a lot about Bucky Barnes, and if that will help him, I guess it’s a good place to start.  So I settle in and tell him everything I know.  Sometimes, he leans forward, rapt with attention to details that have been lost to him.  Sometimes, he nods slightly, as if what I say corresponds to something familiar to him.        
    Sometimes, he looks like he’s going to cry, and I look away before I can tell for certain whether his tears are falling because it breaks my heart into a million billion pieces to even think about.  Because Bucky Barnes was a good person, a brave soldier, a hero who didn’t come home.  And right now he’s sitting in my living room trying to somehow reclaim these second-hand shreds of his stolen life and he deserved better ten times over.  
    As a historian, I have sometimes been discouraged about the work that I do.  That it doesn’t really matter to anyone.  It doesn’t invent new technology like Tony Stark’s work, it doesn’t discover new realms like Dr. Jane Foster’s work, it doesn’t create super-soldiers or cure diseases or _do anything_ , really.  But right now I am so grateful for the work that I’ve done, so glad that I can give it all to Bucky right now, however small it may be, and that it may help him to know who he is.  Or at least, who he was.  If it will help him to figure out who he could be, instead of the nightmare he’s been programmed to be, then that matters, right?    
    It is somewhere around three in the morning now.  I have finally exhausted my store of Bucky-knowledge, and he looks a little dazed.  He stares at his hands, turning them over as he looks from skin to metal, trying to sift through everything I’ve told him in the past eight hours and reconcile it with himself.  And then my stomach growls so loudly that it must have broken his train of thought.  He looks up at me curiously.  I don’t know how often cryogenically frozen assassins need to eat, but I am starving.  “Are you hungry?” I ask him.  
    He thinks this over, and he looks like he’s made some important revelation as he nods his head and says, “Yes, I am.  Could I have something to eat?”  
    “Of course you can!”  I jump up and head into the kitchen.  He follows me.  “Help yourself to anything,” I tell him as I rummage around in the freezer.  Cooking isn’t really my strong suit, but I have an abundance of frozen pizzas.  I feel kind of guilty about this and I hope he doesn’t mind.  Haha, because they kept him frozen, get it?  I’ll show myself out...  
    As I slide a pizza into the oven, Bucky pours himself a glass of milk.  Like, no big deal, just Bucky Barnes in my kitchen having a glass of milk at three a.m.  
    “What are you going to do now?” I ask him as we eat our pizza.  
    “I don’t know,” he says.  
    “You can stay here as long as you need to,” I offer.  
    “No.”  
    “Why not?”  
    “They’ll kill you.”  
    Oh.  Right.  That.  Well, I can’t argue with that reason.  “Where will you go?” I ask.  
    He doesn’t answer.  He is staring at the window.  I don’t know what he thinks he sees, the blinds are closed.  I want to ask if something is wrong but clearly something is, and I’m afraid asking will make it worse.  Make it real.  
    He turns back to me.  Is he staring at my boobs?  WTF?    
    “We have to go,” he says.  “Now.”  
    “What?  _We_ have to go?  What do you mean?  Where?”  
    I look down and see a red dot moving up my chest.  Well, that can’t be good.    
    I notice that the blinds are bent, so they don’t entirely cover the window at the bottom, and I don’t really have time to process anything else because Bucky is lunging at me and we hit the floor as a sharp _pew_ sound rushes past and one of my cupboards rattles.  Yeah, this is bad.  
    “We have to go,” he insists.  I am not arguing.  He is on top of me, so I can’t really breathe plus I’m afraid if I open my mouth I’m going to scream, so I just nod.  
    Bucky gets up and swings me into his arms, running us to the bedroom as another _pew_ knocks a picture off my wall.  He kicks out the window over the back fire escape.  Oh god, please do not let him do what I think he’s going to do.    
    He does.  I cling to his neck and close my eyes as he jumps off the landing, three stories down.  I am still too scared to even scream, or think much past wondering how I am not dead right now.  And, really, everything is kind of a blur so I’m not entirely sure that I’m _not_ dead.  
    I realize that everything is kind of a blur because he is running.  He can run _fast_.  I keep my face buried against his shoulder because I’d rather get shot in the back of the head than in the face, frankly.  Don’t ask me how I can be so vain at a time like this.  Priorities...  
    From what I can tell, I think we are being pursued by people in cars and they take a few more shots at us but he keeps going.  He runs so fast, can jump so far -- even carrying me -- that he manages to evade them.  Before long, the noises of the city have faded.  I look around and recognize the woody, deserted banks of the Potomac over on the Maryland side.  
    Did I just get kidnaped by the Winter Soldier?    
    No.  He’s Bucky Barnes.  I’ll be okay.  I know him, right?  We’re old friends?    
    “Where are we going?” I ask.  He abruptly stops and sets me down, but my legs are shaking and I can’t hold myself up very well.  I sit uneasily on a fallen tree and try not to puke.  
    “I...I don’t have a mission,” he says, helplessly.  “I don’t know.”  
    I look down the river at the capital.  You can still see smoke rising from the massive wreckage site where a few days ago three state of the art airborne aircraft carriers were destroyed in an accident during a training exercise.  At least, that’s what they said happened.  They’ve been pretty busy trying to clean up the flood of highly classified information that swept the internet when it all went down, information that would suggest there’s a lot more to it than aircraft carriers and training exercises.    
    Suddenly, I’m not sure I believe it.  Actually, no.  I’m sure that I don’t.  I feel like I don’t recognize the world, like I can’t trust anything I thought I knew.    
    But, that’s not true is it?  Because I knew about Bucky, about him being the Winter Soldier, didn’t I?  And here he is, right in front of me now.  Everyone has told him that he’s the Winter Soldier, but I look at him and I know that he really is Bucky.  I think he knows it, too.    
    I am struck with recognition as I take in the way he’s standing, the look on his face.  It reminds me of one of my favorite photos of the Howling Commandos.  They weren’t actually the Howling Commandos yet, this picture had been taken when they arrived back at the Allied army camp after their rescue.  Mr. Morita kept the picture framed on his mantle.  Some guy from the 107th had snapped it from the crowd and sent it to him, because he’s standing right next to Captain America as they walk into the camp.  And Bucky is on Cap’s other side, looking all steadfast and brave even though they had just been through so much hell.  It occurs to me that their friendship was the entire reason Captain America went and rescued those guys in the first place, that the Howling Commandos ever even existed.    
    I don’t know who rescued Bucky this time, but thinking about that picture, I know what we should do now.  
      “We need to find Steve Rogers,” I whisper.  
    Bucky nods.  “I know him.  We’re old friends.”


End file.
